Tablet Session – Flash Memory Summit
August 9, 2011, flash memory summit, Santa Clara, CA—a small group of experts and pundits looked at the issues, trends, and forecasts for tablets. They also look at the effects that these devices will have on various types of storage.
Bob O’Donnell, program vice president for clients and displays at IDC noted the diversity of devices in the marketplace. There are changes in the PC, notebook, tablet PC, and media tablets markets as well as smart phones with displays of less than 5 inches. These various markets are defined by their operating system and CPU.
The increasing number and type of clients is giving rise to more personal devices. These devices address users wants and needs and lead to market divergence. The common thing across all platforms is they all have screens, storage, and a CPU. The different devices are optimized for different times of use.
A survey of iPad owners showed that these people have an avg of 6.6 devices for data creation and consumption in the US and 4.8 devices per person than the rest of the world. As a result, the expectation is that the primary devices will be a PC and a smart phone while the tablet PC market will continue to be a smaller but sizable portion of the market. The operating systems of choice for tablets are iOS and Android, because Windows expects users to operate a keyboard first and use touch last. The tablet operating systems at this time are optimized for consumption and real time capture, but not structured content creation.
Along these lines, Windows 8 on ARM processors will be a disaster. Wintel machines have arrived at a relatively common platform and a lot of time has gone into creating and optimizing drivers for the various peripherals available. The software features will not be easily available on an ARM platform. PC and smart phones will continue to dominate the market and non-windows ARM based smart phones will sell much larger unit volumes than PCs.
Last year, Wintel machines accounted for 47 percent of the 300 million data products sold. Symbion on ARM accounted for almost 19 percent, and iOS got about 12.5 percent. In ’14, these numbers are expected to change for a total market of 1.5 billion units. Wintel will get about 26 percent, Android about 26 percent, and iOS about 15 percent.
Key applications for data devices are e-mail, web browsing, and music. All the platforms can work with any of these and cannibalization will happen mostly in the notebook segment. Tablets will affect the lifetimes of PCs by stretching out replacement cycles. Consumers are placing no value on data plans for tablets and other mobile computing devices, so a WiFi only configuration is the best bet. Future consumers will have multiple devices and the ability to find useful apps will matter.
Nagesh Puppala, segment director for the netbook and tablet group at Intel suggested that the experience must be mobile, easy to use, trusted, and customizable. In tablets, a number of form factors will appear in the near future including dual screen, slider, and convertible. The use cases and needs will drive changes in form factors and will affect size shape and weight.
The silicon for these devices is following process trends and now moving to 22 nm. This process will enable the integration of more features which might include wireless displays, and always on functionality. Advanced tablets will also have imaging and PC sync capabilities which will enable cross-platform experiences. These devices need flash memory for performance and low power. It would like to have something like throughput of a SATA interface but at eMMC power levels.
Paul Wassenburg, from SATA (Serial ATA International Organization) described the changes in the standards that are needed by the different PC and consumer markets. Some of the new standards include new form factors for a µSATA 1.8 inch drive, new connectors for the various tribes, a mSATA in a mini PCIe form factor which enables auto detection of SATA or PCIe. In the latest is a new JEDEC standard BGA µSATA.
Another area they been working on is power management with emphasis on reducing power modes. Interfaces now have partial active and slumber modes while devices have idle, standby, and sleep modes. At the same time, they are also adding specifications for 6 GB per second SATA. Tablets are an interesting market because business users have different needs from consumer users. Business users need multitasking, PC- like browsers, and increased storage driving a change from the limited amounts of storage in NAND flash and SD cards to the new BGA SATA drives.
Robert Thompson, director of Smart mobility devices at Freescale, noted that 18 million tablets were sold last year of which 16.5 million were iPads. This market is expected to increase to over 240 million units in the next four years. Tablets will overtake notebooks in two years. The market shares of the various product types will be changing in a market that continues to grow.
One of the issues for tablets as pricing. Most of the new releases are listed at over $600 compared to the $300 for a notebook which is considered to be a reasonable price. Tablets suffer from poor promotion and weak advertising. In addition, the honeycomb version of Android is not quite ready for prime time. Market placement is depending on immature channels. People still do not understand use models for tablets; first emphasis was on size, now it’s moving towards increasing segmentation and multiple form factors.
The tablet market is moving away from the consumer into vertical markets that are customized for applications, functions, and market specifics for business, education, ruggedized functions, industrial functions, medical, and others. The form factors will change from an iPad-like slate to something specific to the multiple vertical markets, which need the functions of a tablet-like device.
The form factors for different use models are likely to be: on-the-go on a 7-inch tablet for one hand operation, and on-the-couch on a 10-inch tablet for two-handed operation. Specialized consumer variance will appear in very large growth for this market is expected in China.
One of the issues facing tablets is their penetration is being blocked by IT managers. As a result, diversification will be corporation based and then we’ll move to other verticals. The IT managers are concerned about the security issues resulting from bring-your-own devices into the corporate environment.
Tablet functions will include games, e-mail, web browsing, and the specialized applications for the specific vertical markets all of these devices will need storage, because a thin client still needs local storage. One way to address this is to make that tablets, about 3 mm thicker than existing tablets to include a 250 GB hard disk drive. The issue is cost versus the security of a shared storage configuration.
